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School Doors Closed for Millions

Political Will, Resources Needed to Guarantee Right to Education

(London) – Discriminatory laws and policies and a lack of political will to carry out basic human rights obligations by countries around the globe are keeping millions of children and adolescents out of school, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Senior government education officials, global policymakers, and funding agencies will meet in Norway on June 13-16, 2016, to adopt measures to improve access to quality education globally.

The 89-page report, “The Education Deficit: Failures to Protect and Fulfill the Right to Education in Global Development Agendas,” says that governments around the world made a commitment two decades ago to remove barriers to education for their children. But Human Rights Watch found that discriminatory laws and practices, high fees, violence, and other factors keep children and adolescents out of school in many countries. The report is based on Human Rights Watch research in more than 40 countries, covering nearly two decades. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, has reported that 124 million children and adolescents are out of school.

“It is unthinkable that in 2016, millions of children and adolescents across the globe are being denied their right to an education,” said Elin Martínez, children’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Weak government monitoring and a lack of zero-discrimination policies often give education officials unchecked power to decide who can come through the school door and who is left out.”

All 196 UN member countries have adopted legal obligations toward all children in their territories. The widely ratified Convention on the Rights of the Child and various regional and other international treaties set out detailed requirements to protect the right to education. In September 2015, all governments agreed to work together to “ensure inclusive and quality education for all” by 2030, as part of the UN-endorsed Sustainable Development Goals, making access to secondary education a global target for the first time. The previous development goals, the Millennium Development Goals, sought to ensure full access to and completion of primary education, but they remain unmet.

It is unthinkable that in 2016, millions of children and adolescents across the globe are being denied their right to an education.

Elin Martínez

children’s rights researcher

Despite the obligation in many international treaties to remove primary school fees and associated costs, many countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa, charge fees that families cannot afford. Fees and associated costs at the secondary level stop millions of adolescents in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal, for example, from finishing at least nine years of education.

“My last year of school was the first semester of the first year of junior high. I really wanted to continue studying, but I really didn't have the money,” said Endah, who dropped out of school in Indonesia to work as a child domestic worker at age 15. “The school fee was 15,000 rupiah (US$1.10) per month. But what I really couldn’t afford was the ‘building fee’ and the uniform. It was 500,000 rupiah (US$37) …. Then each semester we had to buy books.”

School-related violence affects more than 246 million children, the UN agency for children, UNICEF, says. Corporal punishment in schools – a practice that amounts to torture and degrading treatment, and has a negative impact on children’s ability to learn – is lawful or remains widespread in countries including Tanzania, South Africa, and many US states.

Millions of children with disabilities in China and South Africa, and children from various ethnic, language, or religious groups in India, experience widespread discrimination by government officials when they try to register in schools. Once in school, many of these children are put in segregated classrooms where they receive low quality of education. Many children with disabilities drop out due to lack of trained teachers, lack of support, and denial of admission to further education. In Russia and Serbia, for example, children with disabilities are disproportionately institutionalized, often with access only to low-quality education, if any.

A growing number of children living in humanitarian crises and long-term conflicts are unable to claim their right to education, with schools either inaccessible or unsafe. Attacks against schools and takeover of schools for military purposes have kept millions of children in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Palestine, Ukraine, and Yemen out of school.

All governments should ensure that primary education is truly free and compulsory, and that secondary education is free. Governments should eliminate discriminatory policies or regulations that allow schools to exclude children and adolescents, and ensure that schools accommodate the needs of girls, children with disabilities, children from minority groups, and LGBT children.

Governments should abolish corporal punishment by law and adopt stricter measures to ensure that children are safe from violence, abuse, and harassment in schools.

Donors – including multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Global Partnership for Education – and international agencies that help governments carry out their education plans should uphold human rights standards and not compromise on abuses that leave children and adolescents out of school.

The UN secretary-general and UNESCO should ensure that “champion countries” – which lead global initiatives in education – comply with their own human rights obligations and halt abuses in their own education systems.

“There should be no tolerance for failure where providing access to education for all the world’s children and adolescents is concerned,” Martínez said. “Children can’t wait another 15 years, or even another school year, for their governments to fully guarantee their right to prepare for their future.”

Quotes from the report

“Most [students at] mainstream schools don’t have to pay. But for us, we have to pay school fees. Lots of parents who have children with disabilities can’t work – we have to take care of them 24 hours. Schools write to ask why we haven’t paid but they don’t understand our situation.”
–Father of an 8-year-old boy with autism, Johannesburg, South Africa

“Me and my cousin are the only two Syrians in the class. The rest of the students have ‘ganged up’ on us and are saying we speak a lot, that we misbehave. The teacher sent us to the back of the class. All teachers treat me badly because I’m Syrian. When one of the teachers asks a Jordanian girl and she answers the question then the teacher says ‘Bravo!’ When I answer, I get nothing.”
–Hadeel (pseudonym), 11, Al-Zarqa, Jordan

“They would beat me when the teacher couldn’t see them, and my teacher didn’t know so wasn’t stopping it. My father visited the school director to complain, and the director said, ‘You should stop sending her to school if you’re worried about it…’ In Syria, I loved school. I had friends. I loved learning.”
–Fatima, 12, Turgutlu, Turkey

“One [teacher] tried to convince me to have sex so I didn’t want to go [on] to Form 2 to experience that. I stopped going [to sports]. I did this because I was scared that if I was going to meet him he would take me somewhere else to do things with me. I felt bad and [teachers] called to tell me that I wasn’t concentrating or studying so [my] performance was not good…I decided to drop out of school and stop wasting my parents’ money.”
–Ana, 16, Mwanza, Tanzania

“The Japanese school system is really strict with the gender system. It imprints on students where they belong and don’t belong – in later years when gender is firmly tracked, transgender kids really start suffering. They either have to conceal and lie or act like themselves and invite bullying and exclusion.”
–A transgender high school teacher, Japan

“My uncles forced me to marry a man who was old enough to be my grandfather. I was going to school and in class six. I liked school. If I was given a chance to finish school, I would not be having these problems, working as a waitress and having separated from my husband.”
–Akur L., married at the age of 13, South Sudan

“I fell pregnant last year when I was 14 years old. I had stopped going to school that same year because my mother, who works as a maid earning $50 per month, could not afford to send me to school. I had an affair with an older man who had a wife. I went to hospital and gave birth to a baby, who died within a few minutes of birth… I wish to go back to school because I am still a child.”
–Abigail C., 15, Zimbabwe

“[The army] fired on my school with a tank…. When I ran away, a shabiha [a state sponsored militia] caught my shoulder, but I struggled and managed to get away. The shabiha came into the school and shot the windows, broke the computers. After that, I only went back to take my exams.”
–Rami, 12, a refugee from Daraa governorate in Syria, interviewed in Ramtha, Jordan

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